"Senior lenders have every legal right to foreclose, but in practice they don't want to because they have to pay millions of dollars of transfer taxes, and still need someone to buy and manage the property," said Ben Thypin, senior market analyst at Real Capital Analytics Inc, a real estate research firm.

"It will take months, if not quarters, to resolve this," he said. "The most likely scenario is an equity foreclosure by the mezzanine lenders, after they agree with the senior lenders to modify terms of the senior loan. No one could buy the property with the $3 billion loan at the current terms."

Ben Carlos Thypin

I am currently the co-founder of Quantierra, the world's first data driven real estate brokerage and investment manager. In my former life as Director of Market Analysis at Real Capital Analytics, I worked with press outlets large and small to provide them with great data and insightful commentary. Here are some of the results of this collaboration. For the rest, please check out the News Archive.